Suchergebnisse

Part I: The Politics of Art: All at Sea -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Diving In -- Chapter 2: Two Artists and the Tides -- Chapter 3: Decolonising Contemporary Art? Collage+ -- Part II: Drowning and Waving -- Chapter 4: Fluidity, Death, Denial: The Rwanda Genocide -- Chapter 5: Death and the Mediterranean -- Chapter 6: Undocumented People's Self-Advocacy: Between Drowning and Dreaming -- Part III: Back to Sea: Imperial Sunsets -- Chapter 7: Fear of Flooding: Convivial Racism in The Netherlands -- Chapter 8: HMS UK Hits the Rocks -- Chapter 9: Concluding Notes: Flotsam and Jetsam.

This commentary piece reflects on the range of contributions to this Special Issue, considering the ways in which the European context fails to offer more inclusionary notions of citizenship in the current era. A long-term decline in state legitimacy in Europe and in the UK cannot be offset by the intensified policing of insecurity that is known as the War on Terror. The Global Social Justice movement is considered as an alternative framework for what security might mean in the absence of state violence. The importance of diasporic identities to such movements comes across in the research project that underpins this Special Issue. States in Europe and the British state, which is focused on here, are experiencing what can be called a 'beseiged legitimacy'. The relative disbelief in official accounts of events by many citizens, such as those interviewed by researchers involved in this Special Issue, combines with a global economy that increasingly resembles a casino.

According to Frantz Fanon, decolonisation starts out as 'a programme of complete disorder'. This idea is interestingly echoed in the Creole expression 'ce on dezod ka me lod', which translated means that through chaos comes order. In 1998–1999 Martinique lost 23,000 working days; strikers blockaded the ports of Pointe à Pitre in Guadeloupe and Fort de France in Martinique for several weeks at a time in 1998. Trade unions have built up membership levels of eighty to ninety per cent in hotels and in public administration. In this article we will be examining some of the consequences and causes of new forms of socio-economic action and political protest that have emerged in the French Caribbean since the end of the Cold War. For a long time, the French Caribbean was a haven of relative calm and prosperity in the Caribbean. The Dutch Antilles and Aruba and the British dependent territories (now renamed UK Overseas Territories) have also generally shared this good fortune. Today the relative prosperity of the non-sovereign territories is becoming more marked as independent Caribbean states slip into economic recession and growing poverty, so that their political systems and leaders face an endemic crisis of political legitimacy.

Any adequate account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda must acknowledge
manipulation by external forces, domestic pressures and psychological factors.
Even so, the nature of the Rwandan state must be seen as absolutely
central. The genocide took place under the aegis of the state, and Rwandans
were the main actors involved. Both precolonial legacies and colonial policies
contributed to the formation of this state, whose increasingly autocratic and
unpopular government was, by the early 1990s, facing serious threats to its
hold on state power, for which genocide represented a last-ditch attempt at
survival. Many of the mechanisms through which genocide was prepared,
implemented and justified in Rwanda bore striking resemblances to those
used during the twentieth century's other major genocide, the Nazi Holocaust
against the Jews.

Compares constitutional and political structures in the French, Dutch, and British Caribbean; finds little support for independence, but recommends administrative reforms, particularly in British dependencies.

AbstractThe Sahel region has become fairly well known as an environmentally vulnerable region where human inventiveness and collective organisation have been able to reverse processes of land degradation, brought about by earlier 'maldevelopment'. This paper sets out to explore schisms between local accounts of the spiritual significance of environmental decay, and regeneration involving interventions by external development agencies. It focuses on the case of two Northern NGOs. The two project-level examples are located in Mali; one is a World Vision-sponsored tree seedling project, the other an SOS Sahel-sponsored well-digging scheme. Each presents a contrasting approach to local beliefs in God; the first attempts to 'correct' what are seen as wrong beliefs; the second seeks to build on existing beliefs and religious practices. In the one. relations between humans and the natural environment are conceived as being spiritually laden, in the other they are seen as almost purely functional. If Sahelian people are to be held responsible for environmental regeneration, then their religious beliefs about nature, however complex, need to be incorporated into the design of development interventions from the outset.

AbstractThe Sahel region has become fairly well known as an environmentally vulnerable region where human inventiveness and collective organisation have been able to reverse processes of land degradation, brought about by earlier 'maldevelopment'. This paper sets out to explore schisms between local accounts of the spiritual significance of environmental decay, and regeneration involving interventions by external development agencies. It focuses on the case of two Northern NGOs. The two project-level examples are located in Mali; one is a World Vision-sponsored tree seedling project, the other an SOS Sahel-sponsored well-digging scheme. Each presents a contrasting approach to local beliefs in God; the first attempts to 'correct' what are seen as wrong beliefs: the second seeks to build on existing beliefs and religious practices. In the one. relations between humans and the natural environment are conceived as being spiritually laden, in the other they are seen as almost purely functional. If Sahelian people are to be held responsible for environmental regeneration, then their religious beliefs about nature, however complex, need to be incorporated into the design of development interventions from the outset.